Take care of your employees and they will take care of your business.
Zazie a French restaurant in San Francisco offers great benefits to it’s staff which helped the restaurant avoid labour shortage when most of the restaurants across US were devastated by labour shortage resulting in shutting their dining rooms, cutting their opening hours, or even closing for good.
The co-owner of Zazie says that it’s managed to avoid the labour shortage because of the the benefits it offers it’s staff.
Benefits like paid family leave, health and dental insurance, and a 401(k) with employer match.
“Everyone returned after we reopened,” Megan Cornelius, co-owner of the restaurant, told Insider. She said that Zazie had a “very low” turnover because it offered benefits that other restaurants didn’t, and that just one server left during the pandemic because they changed careers.
Cornelius said that staff had only left the restaurant to either change city or switch careers. No one had to quit to go work at another restaurant.
Restaurant has around 40 employees, half of which have been at Zazie for at least 10 years,
Cornelius herself was a server at Zazie for around nine years before she bought the restaurant along with its executive chef and its general manager in January 2020.
Previous owner of Zazie started the no-tip policy.
The staff of the restaurant get extra money through profit sharing,
Servers get 12% of their sales, and 12% of the restaurant’s total sales are shared between back-of-house staff, which Cornelius said created less of a division between front- and back-of-house staff and removed the bias associated with tipping.
“Profit sharing just made sense to us as it’s reflective of how busy we are,” Cornelius said. “If we are busy, the staff and the restaurant make money
A banner on its website reads – “Zazie is proud to be tip-free!”
Some diners do leave tips which servers take for themselves or can share with other staff.
The restaurant was able to finance the benefits to the staff by hiking the price of their menu
The restaurant currently charges around $20 for sandwiches at lunch and $35 for dinner entrées
Staff at Zazie are paid $16.32 per hour, but after profit sharing they end up making $1,000 or more a week.
The restaurant also paid their staff for the first month it was closed during the pandemic, and maintained their health and dental insurance while staff received unemployment benefits.
It also paid their staff when the restaurant was shut for two weeks for repairs.
Cornelius said that this way people will start respecting the restaurant staff
“I just really hope that people kind of take a second look at their server or take a second look at their busboy or the dishwasher when they go into the restaurant and really appreciate how hard they’re working,” Cornelius said
Source – Yahoo News
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